


Suns and Sand

by thedevilchicken



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 16:54:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14835528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Cassian and K-2 are stuck on Tatooine attempting to complete a mission.Their unexpected, enthusiastic help comes from a moisture farmer's nephew who hates the sand just as much as Cassian does.





	Suns and Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thymesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thymesis/gifts).



"I'm sure the boy would have cooperated without the need for intercourse," K-2 says, disapprovingly, and Cassian rubs his eyes in exasperation underneath his goggles as the speeder meanders its way through the canyon. It's not very speedy for a speeder. Frankly, he can see why the price they paid was so crazy low.

"I wouldn't call him a boy," Cassian replies, defensively, and he immediately hates that he sounds defensive because he really shouldn't feel the need to defend his operational decision-making to an ex-imperial droid with an overdeveloped sense of sarcasm like K-2SO. Most of the time, he does it anyway. He guesses he enjoys the repartee. 

Cassian tugs his goggles back down into place against the stupid Tatooine sand that's been getting everywhere - _everywhere_ \- for the last two weeks, then he frowns at K-2 who's sitting there in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel, perfectly at ten and two like someone's particularly mechanical mom. He's not driving because Cassian can't pilot a speeder, more because Cassian just spent the last forty minutes sleeping off a hangover of epic proportions stretched out on the back seat till some jackass took a potshot at them from the hills and woke him back up. K-2 shot back with Cassian's blaster - hell if he remembered him taking it, they'll need to have words about that - and Cassian climbed over into the passenger seat, where he tripped into a heap with one cheek squished up awkwardly against the dash before he rearranged himself. He took the blaster back with a pointed look before K-2 could say anything about his landing. It's still in his hand, in case someone tries again. He guesses he can't say Luke didn't warn them about the Sand People.

"I'm pretty sure he can't be that much younger than me," Cassian says, putting his feet up on the dash where his cheek just was.

K-2 turns to look at him, which would be pretty unnerving since he's zigzagging between boulders along the canyon floor except Cassian's used to that by now. Honesly, the fact he doesn't find it unnerving is a whole lot more unnerving than them dodging huge rocks while talking about his sex life, such as it is.

"I'd calculate that he's six to seven years younger than you," K-2 says. For a droid with an expressionless face, he sure manages to look expressiony sometimes - like now, when his tone of voice and his body language and the cant of his photoreceptors all scream _frowning_. To say K-2's a droid, he's sure a mother hen sometimes where Cassian's concerned. 

"And that would make him what, seventeen, eighteen?" Cassian says. He taps the lenses in his goggles idly with his callused fingertips. He looks stupid in them but he doesn't really care - he's done stupider things in the line of duty than wearing goggles that make him look like a failed pod racer. "Do you know what I was doing when I was seventeen?"

"I'm not entirely sure I want to," K-2 says, drily. 

"And hey, stop calling it 'intercourse'." Cassian winces, though whether that's from the word or the hangover is anyone's guess. "It makes it sounds so...clinical."

"Isn't it?" K-2 asks, and he mercifully looks away again, back at the dusty, rocky track between the sun-bleached hills that's nowhere close to well-travelled enough to be called a path, let alone a road. "I don't know why you humans are so attached to coitus. It so often leads to manipulation or poor decision-making."

"Sure, and sometimes both," Cassian admits, and he shrugs and he yawns and he stretches hugely. But he also has to admit that K-2 gets a pretty lousy idea of the fundamentals of human sexual interaction from working with him. "Y'know, Kay, not all humans use sex to manipulate each other into doing things."

"Is that so?" K-2 replies, just as deadpan as usual. 

"Sure." Cassian ruffles his own hair with one hand that he's still not managed to scrub the grease off of from the last time the speeder broke down. His hair's full of sand, but then so are his boots and it's under his nails and pretty much everywhere else besides. "You know, it's not like I slept with Luke 'cause he wouldn't've _cooperated without the need for intercourse_." 

"So why, then?"

Cassian shrugs. "He's a good kid. He liked me. He showed me a good way to get rid of the sand." 

K-2 eyes him. He reaches out and wipes the sand off the rim of Cassian's goggles with one large hand. "His 'good way' doesn't seem to have worked very well," he points out. 

What Cassian doesn't say is K-2's being pretty uncharitable for someone who got a free lubricant bath back at the Lars moisture farm to get the sand out of his joints that he'd been complaining about for hours. And because he doesn't say that, he doesn't have to imply that K-2's maybe jealous of Luke - maybe not of what he did with Luke, no, because K-2's got too fucked up an idea of sex from him for either of them to try that, but maybe of the time that Cassian spent with him. Under the right set of circumstances (or maybe kind of the wrong ones), K-2 can get pretty sulky, but that's all just a part of his charm.

He leaves it alone and he lets K-2 drive, and he thinks back over the two weeks that've passed since they landed while he not-quite-basks in the too-hot suns. They landed two weeks ago, at the spaceport at Anchorhead, in a beat-up old transport with tags that'd been faked so many times that Cassian wasn't sure if they'd ever been real. They'd been sent to gather intel on some kind of really dubious-sounding potential Hutt collaboration with the Empire, not that the Hutts taking anyone's side but the Hutts' sounded likely to anyone, let alone Cassian, except if maybe they'd decided it was in their best interests.

So, there Cassian was three hours after they landed, propping up a worn cantina bar and inviting himself into other people's conversations. Three hours after that, he'd gotten himself robbed of pretty much everything they had and roughed-up in an alley behind the same shitty little cantina, and K-2 lecturing him didn't help the situation one single bit. Luke, on the other hand, really did: they him met three hours after that, sometime past dawn, down by the spaceport. Somehow, neither Cassian nor K-2 saw him there as they talked. 

"Hey, are you with the rebellion?" the kid asked, interrupting them. He looked about twelve till Cassian peered closer - he guessed it was his wide-eyed enthusiasm in the bright morning sun. _Suns_. The godforsaken place was nothing but sand and suns.

"That's not very polite," K-2 replied, as if _polite_ was any part of his programming. 

"It's not very smart, either," Cassian added. If any place on the planet was friendly to the rebel alliance, Cassian knew it was Anchorhead, but there are just some things you don't ask strangers, even there. He frowned. "Anyway, what do you care?"

"I heard what happened," the kid told them both, and he jutted his chin a little like maybe he was tough. "And maybe I'd like to help." 

"Maybe you'd like to turn us in," K-2 said. 

"Maybe he's right," said Cassian. 

Luke shrugged. "Maybe I'm not desperate," he said, looking at them pointedly, maybe just a little petulantly, and Cassian couldn't help but laugh though it made the kid scowl at him. He knew the type - backwater planet, nothing to do, bored out of his skull, the kid just wanted to see some action. He'd've done pretty much anything to get it, Cassian thought, and sure, okay, fine, he'd oblige. 

They met him outside town an hour later so no one would see they'd left with him, just in case. They hopped into his speeder and let him take them out across the dunes to a little windswept moisture farm, someplace past the edge of civilization. The suns were really beating down by then. Cassian was glad to get into the shade and dab a little antiseptic on the cut above his eye. 

"Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are away for a while," he said, when they went down the steps and walked inside, then he turned to Cassian and held out one hand. "I forgot to say earlier. I'm Luke Skywalker." 

Cassian gave his hand a squeeze. "Cassian Andor," he replied, though K-2 muttered something about safety and security and that having excellent fake identities meant nothing if he gave out his real name to everyone they met. 

"Sure, but I don't think Luke is _everyone_ ," Cassian said, and Luke beamed like no one had said anything nice about him in his entire life. Cassian didn't think for a moment that was true, but it was a really nice smile nonetheless. 

They worked out of the garage where Luke said his aunt and uncle usually kept their speeder, except they were off buying parts someplace way the way out past Mos Espa. Cassian slept on a bedroll Luke brought in for him, apologizing that he didn't have anything better for him, but Cassian had had at least twenty times worse. Like the ground. Like rocky ground. Like wet, rocky ground. 

And, in the morning, Luke brought breakfast, then he drove Cassian back out to Anchorhead - all they had in the transport was a couple of changes of clothes, two blasters and three crates of expensive Corellian brandy, so he sold one in town and bought a big box of supplies and a shitty fifth-hand landspeeder that K-2 eyed distastefully as Luke helped them tow it back out of town. 

Luke helped him fix it up, the two of them getting grease all over their hands for days. Sometime past the end of the week, Cassian reached out and rubbed a smudge of it from under Luke's eye with the pad of his thumb. Luke smiled, so so did Cassian, and then they went back to work. He and K-2 would need the old junkheap to get out to Jabba's palace and complete their fuck-up of a mission, after all. That's where they're going now.

He thinks back over the two weeks that've passed since they landed. He thinks about all of his fifty-times-daily complaints about the sand and the sun and the sunburn and Luke rubbing ointment into his cheeks with his fingertips to try to stop him burning even more, though how the blue-eyed blond guy got burned less than he did remains a mystery even now. He thinks about grimacing as the ubiquitous damn Tatooine sand got caught up in it and he thinks about Luke looking away as he said, _y'know, I know a way to clean the sand off_. He thinks about being kinda skeptical about that, 'cause water was at a premium on worlds like Tatooine. 

But, while K-2 was getting his lube bath, Luke stripped Cassian down to his sandy skin. He did it right there, in the workshop with his unsteady hands, then he put on a pair of mitts, and however it was that they worked as he moved them around over Cassian's skin, they really did work. They made his skin tingle. They were ten times better than a sonic. And when Luke wrapped one mitted hand around Cassian's cock, hesitant and halfway sheepish like he wasn't sure what he was doing, like he wasn't sure he wouldn't get his lights punched out, he let him do it. He figured he'd had worse ideas. He liked Luke, after all, though it wasn't like that was some kind of a prerequisite. 

He let Luke go down on his knees and put his mouth on him, but only for a moment - he motioned him back up to his feet, brushed back his hair and kissed him on the mouth instead, slowly, till he started to relax. After that, Cassian took the mitts. He watched Luke nervously strip off his clothes, and then he returned the favor. Afterwards, when Cassian put his mouth on him, he didn't pull back till he was done.

They had sex for the first time the next afternoon, after a second session stripped naked with the mitts: Luke bent down low over the workbench and Cassian put his hands on his warm skin, tangled in his temporarily sandless hair. Luke looked back at him, nervously, excitedly, as Cassian slicked his fingers up with ointment then rubbed them slowly in between Luke's cheeks. Luke sighed and shuffled his feet out wider as Cassian teased his fingertips against his hole, then pushed inside, deep and slow. When he pulled back his hand, when he slicked his cock instead, when he rubbed the head against him, when he pushed it deep inside and felt Luke pull tight around him, he wondered idly if he was Luke's first. If he was, as firsts go, it wasn't bad; okay, so Luke stubbed his toe against the bench, curse out loud and made them both laugh, but in the end he had him slowly, and he made sure it was Luke who got off first. 

They had sex for the second time four hours after that, when the suns had set outside. When they'd finished with the speeder and Luke's awful old maps of the routes out from Anchorhead, when Cassian had drunk one too many glasses of the brandy - he'd been smuggling it as cover for his last job - to really have his guard up, they said good night but Luke went nowhere. When Cassian spilled booze over his chin, down his neck, into his collar, Luke stepped in and kissed it away, his mouth against his throat. He unbuttoned Cassian's shirt and said he'd make sure it was washed for him, but Cassian couldn't've cared less about that and it didn't look like Luke did either. Cassian kissed him. Cassian undressed him. He had him on their knees on the bedroll Luke had lent him as they moved together, breathless, his hands gripping tight at Luke's hips. 

They had sex for the third time the next night, as the sun started to set. They'd had a pretty silent dinner except Luke kept breaking into a great big smile, so when they put down the bottle of brandy they'd barely touched and said good night...well, Cassian followed Luke instead of heading to the workshop. Luke stripped first, while Cassian stood there in his bedroom doorway, watching him like an expensive show he'd seen one time in a club on Coruscant, then Cassian took off his clothes, too. They kissed in the doorway looking out over the courtyard, where anyone could've seen if there'd been anyone to see, and he pressed Luke up face-first to the doorframe, pressed his mouth to the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades, to two or three of the notches in the line of his spine. Luke probably thought Cassian would have him again right there but he went down on his hands and knees instead, in the bed in Luke's small bedroom. Luke really didn't need much more encouragement than that and afterwards, when he went back to the workshop, K-2 might've questioned the smile on his face. 

It's been four more days since then and thanks to Luke's help, they have a new plan - they're heading out to Jabba's palace now instead of heading home with their tail between their legs, and K-2 knows everything. Because sure, of course he does, it's not like Cassian keeps too much from him. They're partners, after all.

"I just hope his information is better than his remedies for sand," K-2 says, grouchily. "I envisioned my end much differently." Cassian just sighs and leans back to enjoy the ride as best he can. 

And, as they drive, Cassian thinks he'd like to go back to the moisture farm someday, if he makes it out of this thing alive. He'd like to see Luke again, he thinks. He'd like to kiss him and straddle his thighs on a chair right there at the kitchen table and tell him what being a spy for the rebel alliance is really like, till his eyes go wide the way they do. He turns his head as he smiles 'cause K-2's quiet right now and he really doesn't want to have to explain. 

The thing is, Luke had already agreed to help in any way he could and so no matter what K-2 might say, Cassian really didn't do it to persuade him. If that had been the reason why, he'd've done more than fuck him; he'd've recruited him, too.

"Maybe I could look you up, if I get out of here," Luke said, back at the farm, a hopeful look on his face as they said goodbye. 

Cassian cupped Luke's face in both his hands. He kissed his mouth and smiled a little wryly. 

"You might be disappointed," Cassian replied. "Look, Luke, I have a reputation." 

Luke didn't care. Cassian thinks maybe if he knew him - really _knew_ him - then he might care more, or then again maybe he wouldn't. 

He's not sure he could explain, at least not completely, but he figures maybe a little of Luke's sun-drenched optimism's rubbed off on him a lot like the sand. He wonders how long that will last.


End file.
